The topic of this blog really is one of teaching and learning through technology, so it might sound a little weird for me to begin by suggesting that you shut down for a bit, but the ability to have a holiday from technology is probably just as important a integrating it into one’s life in meaningful, thoughtful and substantive ways, so I’m writing a piece about hitting the “off” button.

As the summer winds down, and we all begin to think about back-to-school shopping and readjusting our schedules to fit all the additional activities that the school year has to offer, I always try to reevaluate the summer and make sure that I packed just enough fun in.  Embarrassingly, although we’ve been hiking and fishing quite a bit, our family has failed to take a weekend to turn off all the technology and head to the hills. So that’s just what we’re going to do this week. No video games, no laptops, and the smart phone will be on standby to use only in case of emergency. We’re going camping–real, hike-in camping with canoes on lake and all!

Before we hit the”off” button on all those devices, though, I think there are some great technology lessons for kids in prepping for the trip itself:

• As Lee LeFever suggests in the classic “Wikis in Plain English” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnL00TdmLY) we’ll start with a shared Wiki page to make sure that we have everything we need. Let the kids tell you what they think might come in handy during the trip, and have the whole family be involved so that nothing gets left behind.

• Next, after we’ve evaluated all that we’ll need to bring along on the trip, one can imagine that a few necessities will still need to be purchased. Shopping for expensive camping equipment can be a great way to teach kids about about thoughtful and frugal shopping techniques (i.e. “let’s read all the reviews about this family tent,” or “can you find a better deal on this sleeping bag?”), and looking at all the fun gear online will quite likely get them excited about the upcoming adventure.

• Planning lightweight, delicious, and (if only somewhat) healthy meals that can easily be packed in and cooked over an open fire can be a great lesson in nutrition and survival approaches.

• Next, use a good interactive map program to locate the best route to the site, and look at the terrain with the satellite view. Use that same view to scout out the best fishing holes and hiking trails!

There’s lots to do in preparing for a camping trip, and engaging kids in the process can be both fun and educationally valuable.  So, please do step away from the machine(s); but, before you go, let the family work together to help get you out there well prepared.

Last year on about this day I wrote a post that ultimately drove to the idea of declaring “Independent THINKING Day” (http://discoverchampions.com/blog/?p=125) for kids all over. It was a fun piece, and rereading it actually sort of tainted my creative juices in the last stretch before the holiday weekend. But someone down tha hall mentioned getting sparklers for her kids. Although it might initially feel like a stretch, we educators are always trying to find that next “spark” that will ignite a kid’s (or adult’s or employee’s) excitement for either the process or the content of our learning objectives.

Some of my fondest memories from childhood 4th of July celebrations revolve around sparklers–from the first year my parents trusted me with them, all the way through my teenage years when we began to use them as punks for their louder older cousins. That unforgetable tingle on the back of your hands, the heat from the all-too-bright center, and the smell of spent combustables. I remember never really getting board with the shapes that you could draw in the air with sparklers–even now I’m still fascinated by it.

In the world of technology, those sparks can, of course, come from interactions with a fun new piece of simulation software, a game that’s infused with learning deep in the core of the experience, or a GPS adventure. Those flashy and expensive things, though, strike me as afforementioned “louder older cousins” in a disussion like this one about fireworks. So, then we should ask, what are the simple little sparklers of electronic education? Activities like sending the kids out on a fuin scavenger hunt of great websites, or allowing a group to maintain a classroom blog/vlog [see Kathy Cassidy's (no relation to the author) class site here: http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=1337]. We can even use Google Docs to create quick, interactive crossword puzzles and other basic games, and a decision-based learning secnario can very quickly be assembled in PowerPoint. And, depending on the design and content, each one of those approaches can be as or more effective than their flashier cousins.

With this all said, I guess I felt like it was about time to pay a little tribute to that little “gateway” firework that many of us hold near and dear to our hearts.  Anyway, Happy 4th

As someone who’s been teaching in the virtual space since nearly the beginning of fully online (over the internet) courses, my personal inclination towards the “anytime, anywhere” that’s so often held up as a key feature of the approach runs deep with me. I love the fact that I can teach my courses very early in the morning with my first cup of coffee, or out on the patio on a lovely summer evening. I love the fact that I rarely have to drive to a campus through traffic, find parking, figure out lunch on the run, etc., etc. I love the fact that I rarely have to be on the spot or in the limelight, and that I can generally be very thoughtful with the interactions I have with my students. An, quite frankly, I love that I can teach in shorts Summer or a sweatshirt in the Winter. All of those features are near and dear to my hear; however, I do sometimes miss the excitement of being in front of as live group and hammering out great academic ideas on the fly.

With that all having been said, I am currently teaching a college-level writing course online, but the institution requires weekly live seminars to lecture on the topic of the week and answer question in real time. Although I found myself dreading the sessions initially, the rush of live performance came right back to me, and I enjoyed the real-time interaction with the students very much. Here at Champions, all of our online math tutoring occurs in real-time also, and the feedback from the kids has been overwhelmingly positive with regards to the real connection they make with the instructor.

So, I suppose that my own lesson here is that although “anytime, anywhere” is a wonderful personal arrangement, the types of interactions that can occur in real time can be very meaningful and substantive, and can really enhance the overall educational experience.

Field Trip!
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Renanim_school_on_field_trip.jpg

With that all said, though, there’s another aspect to computer-based distance learning that’s sometimes overlooked, but is a real benefit, and that’s just in the inherent access to all the information available on the WWW. Students in an art course can take a virtual guided tour of the Louvre Museum or the Met, they can take a virtual walk along the Great Wall of China, or they can even head to Mars.

The instructor guided virtual field trip allows for kids from anywhere to be able to see amazing sites all over the world, and interact with sites and cultures from worlds away. And, with the advent of chat and video-conferencing software, one can even bring in a virtual speaker (i.e. an expert in a field) to guide them through their fun adventures.

Interestingly, I’ve been involved in eLearning for so long, I just assume that everyone speaks the same language as I do, including all the acronyms that are involved in the language of the trade. As I review it, the list of acronyms is a long one just to scrape the surface, you have: LMS, LCMS, CMS, SCORM, LAN, SLA, RLO, IDC, CBT, ISTE, SME, and many more. Although most of these abbreviations really wouldn’t mean much to someone who’s not engaged in the conversation every day, I think that with the rapid growth of the eLearning industry, quite literally, everyone should at least know what an LMS is.

In general terms, an LMS (Learning Management System) is a software application either hosted by a company who develops and/or maintains the site in a SaaS (software as a service) relationship with the end users (normally an institution of learning or a corporation), or it can be hosted on-site by the institution or corporation itself with some sort of licensing fee. An LMS creates a portal site to host eLearning activities and normally includes some sort of registration mechanism, and areas for courses and other learning or social events. It normally gives instructors (or, more generally, course developers) some sort of an interface to post learning-based content, questions for discussion, and assessments of various kinds. There’s generally a variety of asynchronous (not in “real time”) and synchronous (in “real time”) communication tools available to allow teachers and learners to interact with each other, ranging from threaded discussions to chat, video and whiteboards.

In less technical terms, though, the LMS has evolved over time to provide teachers a wide range of tools to replicate or recreate the learning experience that happens in the traditional brick-and-mortar classroom. There are numerous methods of sharing, discussing and testing on the acquisition of information.

Anyway, with that all said, my plan over the next few weeks (or months if this conversation grows) is to continue to post quick blog posts to try to speak to some of the basic online terminology; so, if you’ve heard any terms or acronyms from the eLearning or Web 2.0 space that you’d like to hear defined in “plain English,” please feel free to post a comment to this blog, and I’ll try to accommodate as best I can.

I watched last week as Gmail (the e-mail program from Google) went down and stayed down for quite along time. I watched, too, while the discussions of this outage nearly also brought down Twitter and Facebook, and I began thinking about how different our lives are today than they were just a few years ago. The dependence that many of us have on these simple and free tools to stay immediately connected with our friends, colleagues and coworkers is sometimes mind boggling.

A good example of the aforementioned dependence on immediacy is a line from one of the folks that I follow on Twitter, when he shouted out to his group that he was”Grinding teeth at Gmail outage,”  and asked them to ping him on Twitter if they needed to reach him. Apparently, whatever work he was doing during this outage required him to be immediately available to those around him, and without the tool of e-mail he felt the need to offer another path of contact. This says a real mouthful about where our work habits have come as a society.

What, though, does this further say about the state of Education now? And where is the process of teaching and learning headed? The type of immediacy that’s available in traditional live classroom settings can now be reached through a combination of communication tools that are taking over many financial and economic business channels.  It’s an immediacy too that doesn’t necessarily need to be found through the traditional “synchronous” (real-time) channels that current online educators recognize (i.e. chats, whiteboards and IM). Immediacy can be reached through simple webmail applications (that can also show you which of your contacts is on or offline in case you need a quick synchronous fix), or through short 140 word snippets sent out to groups of instructors, friends, colleagues and peers who can all then respond or add to the conversation.

Based on the findings of a recent  report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the US Department of Education sites: “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.” With that  said, the web is in a place today, right now, where the popular academic goals of collaboration and immediacy have become relatively simple to achieve. I believe that there’s a challenge here for those of us in education to keep our eyes on this fast moving target and keep up with the times.

 Last week I attended a science fair in Chicago called Labfest. Hosted by science Chicago, Labfest is a series of science day fairs happening all summer and is designed to promote science learning for Chicago’s local children and their families.

Champions Science Adventures has gotten in on the fun and is hosting a “Bubbleology” Booth to help people discover the fun in science.  

Young or old, bubbles seem to capture our imagination and we quickly had a crowd of budding scientists gathered to try their hand at making a unique bubble creation. Bubbles are not only a lot of fun, but they are bursting with science. From surface tension to thin film interference, bubbles provide a great platform for us to talk about everyday science all around us.

As the children explored their bubble making abilities, our trained staff provided key questions and challenges designed to promote critical thinking and encourage experimental play. Can you make a square bubble? How many colors swirl on a bubbles surface? Can you predict when a bubble will pop? What is the best soap to use for a long lasting bubble? Stations were hands-on which made it easy for the visitors to test their ideas and discover answers for themselves.

Both our staff scientists and the scientists in training had a great deal of fun. By using the attraction of bubbles to spark the natural curiosity of our visitors, we where able to show that science is fun, important, and relevant. All you need are some simple questions and a natural curiosity to succeed in “Bubbleology”. I left knowing a couple of thousand people who wound never look at soap and water the same way again. So, if you are going to be in Chicago in the month of August come and find our bubble experts at Labfest.

Links:  Labfest    

Science Chicago

Andy Allan “The Science Wiz”

So, with the big mid-summer holiday upon us her in the US, I suppose it really does provide an opportunity to step back and think about the meaning of a day with a name like that. Of course, we always need to stop first and think of the patriotic and historically significant meaning associated with the day first. I love this country, and I love that we take the time to honor those who fought hard to guarantee the many basic freedoms that we can take for granted today.

With that said, though, the idea of independence is farther reaching than just a celebrations of long-gone rockets’ red glare and hot dogs cooking on the grill. Probably because of this very holiday, the word “independence” seems me to carry some heavier undertones than its close cousin, “freedom.” Independence seems to not only speak to the state of being free, but also to the idea of being free in a place where freedoms have somehow or sometime been comprimised. I think that the intellectual state of many american children is similarly comprimised.

Although every child in America has the opportunity to attend a public school and receive his/her rightful education, many children have gaps and opportunities that our system can’t always manage to fill. Although we’ve done a pretty good job as a country of teaching to big learning objectives, there is speculation and data that suggests that many of our children aren’t being given the tools to think critically and solve problems.There are lots of very kind but very busy people in our educational system, and those educators simply can’t be everything for every kid, so we as parents and care-givers need to step in and help.

To help our children, on most local and basic level, we need to find tools to help our kids see outside of just the information they gather to get through the school day. Those tools can be as simple as telling stories around the campfire (with marshmallows, of course), or searching out information about an historical event on the internet together; heck, it can be as simple as plaing a few games of “Old Maid” or “Checkers” every evening. We really do, at minimum, need to keep our kids thinking, and empower them to make thoughtful choices.

Although I am certainly going to celebrate this independance weekend with a few hotdogs and a fireworks show or two, I’m also going to spend some time with my children playing games and solving puzzles. I’m going to do my little part to declare it “Independent THINKING Day” for kids from sea to shining sea.

pV =nRT 

You can tell them that the air molecules around us are racing at over a 1000mph.  The result is always the same. Their faces glaze over, we all swim through an ocean of gas every day and I guess a little familiarity breeds contempt. Therefore you need an experiment that takes gases from the ordinary to extraordinary.

Last week, I set about bringing the power of gases to life for the staff here at our Littleton office. What is the point of having a “science wiz” on staff if you do not get to see something cool once in a while?

So after roping off a large portion of our parking lot and with everything checked for safety, I took a gas that had been super-cooled into a liquid and poured it into a bottle and sealed it. I then quickly took my bottle and dropped it into a trash can for containment. Then we waited!

The molecules of the super-cooled gas were heated by the outside temperature and began speeding up as they went from minus 320 F to about 70 F.  As they heated up they gained energy and quickly started to expand.  The bottle they were sealed in stopped the expansion so the gas molecules started to push on the walls, rapidly increasing the pressure inside the bottle. At somewhere around 100 pounds per square inch, the bottle failed and the gas molecules rushed out at around 1000-mph. This blew away both my trash can and my audience. First there was the huge shockwave boom. It was the kind of noise that you feel in your chest rather than in your ear. Then with car alarms blaring we witnessed pieces of trash can falling back to Earth.

One member of my audience told me it was the coolest thing she had seen at work in 25 years. And I knew that everyone had learned a little something about the power of gases and would not be taken them for granted anytime soon.  

Andy Allan “The Science Wiz”

As the Director of Online Solutions for Champions, a big part of my job is to stay in tune with all things technical, and the innovative trends happening on the internet and off. With that said, I’ve spend a good amount of time over the past few years immersed in the digitally social (or is it socially digital?) world of social networking. I’m a regular Twitter user, I try to blog with some regularity and I follow several great blogs pretty closely, and I’ve even reconnected with some old friends through Facebook.

The key to most of the social technologies lie in the end-users, who are generally groups of people with similar interests who need a space to gather, discuss, learn and share information about those interests. With that said, as I was recently evaluating some content for an online course we are planning to build, I realized just how much of just that eLearning has been doing for well over ten years now.

The electronic school provides a space for learners to gather and learn about/interact with/discuss what we would hope are topics of interest (although this might be more or less true depending on the course topic and the learners enrolled in said course:). Like a blog, the online course often allows the teacher or instructor to provide topic-relevant updates (often in the form of announcements or a lecture), and then allows the readers (in this case, students) an opportunity to comment on that information–either through discussion boards or even in chat rooms. There are places to submit user-generated content (”Drop-boxes” for turning in papers and other submissions–even pictures in an art course), complete with a feedback loop (the gradebook). There are even systems out there that provide wiki technologies that allow students and teachers shared responsibility in creating and editing discovered or gathered course information.

Although there are certainly pieces of social networking that aren’t very prevalent in the eClassroom–microblog (i.e. “Twitter”) technology is not yet a prevalent feature in most common Learning Management Systems, and there are certainly opportunities for tagging and searching to further develop as a tool for sorting learning information, it is kind of neat to think that students and educators were taking advantage of socially interactive technologies years before they became everyday household terms. Chalk one up for the teachers and learners.